I got this from another list I'm on - thought it might be of interest to
vanagonauts.

Joy

June 2, 2011, 8:30 pm,
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/02/fall-of-the-wild/?pagemode=print

Fall of the Wild By TIMOTHY
EGAN<http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/author/timothy-egan/>

  Timothy Egan <http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/category/timothy-egan/>on
American politics and life, as seen from the West.
 GLEN ELLEN, Calif. � Dead at the age of 40, Jack London left behind more
than 50 books produced by his fevered pen, a string of opinionated lovers
and a Sonoma Valley ranch he described as heaven on earth.

For a few months, still, you can see the sunlit room where the author of
�Call of the Wild� wrote his daily thousand words before noon, and walk
under redwoods and wild oaks on his 1,400-acre Beauty Ranch, where he
pioneered �sustainability� before anyone was pushing $20 plates of arugula
with a such a claim.

It belongs to you and me � the ranch, the cottage, the pond, the stone
scraps of an old winery � an inheritance that is now being dismantled.
California created the state park idea with Yosemite in 1864, before it was
a federal reserve; it is destroying it in 2011 with a plan to permanently close
one-fourth of its
parks<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_proposed_California_State_Park_closures_%282011%29>
.

Along with 69 other sites, Jack London State Historic Park will be
shuttered, gates locked, and left to meth labs, garbage outlaws and assorted
feral predators. Nearly 50 percent of all of California�s historic parks are
on the closure list. This is not a scare tactic from the state. Parks go
dark starting in September.

Even during the Great Depression, when this state had 30 million fewer
people, California somehow found a way to keep its parks and heritage sites
open.

The nuclear option is being executed to reach a budget cut of $22 million
mandated by a failed state that is forcing lethal whacks for all, even with
an improved budget forecast. That�s right, $22 million � one-fifth the price
of a recent sale of a single private mansion in Los Altos. It�s a broken
California, sadder by the day, that is not only padlocking parks but may
soon release thousands of prisoners, per a Supreme Court
order<http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/24/us/24scotus.html?scp=3&sq=california%20prisoners&st=cse>.

In the great scheme of things, a park and a place that shows off the guiding
passion of the most popular novelist of his day are small potatoes, yes. Who
needs history and open space when a child may go hungry or a bridge may
collapse? But what is happening now, the death of American life by a
thousand cuts, is the collateral damage of our frozen politics. We don�t
have to commit suicide, as California is doing.
Eric Risberg/Associated PressThe writer�s cottage at Jack London State Park
in California.

These parks already charge user fees to enter. They are popular: the places
put on the executioner�s list draw nearly 6 million visitors a year. On the
recent Sunday I strolled through Jack London�s ranch, the park was packed
with picnickers, hikers, birders, history buffs, people �trying to get out
of nature that something which we all need,� as London said.

And, you can argue, people had their chance to save the parks. Last year,
Californians voted down a measure that would have slightly raised their auto
license fees to add $500 million for the parks. A majority felt � not
without good reason � that lawmakers who created an unsustainable pension
system could not be trusted to keep their hands out of a park fund.

The still-life of this political insanity includes not just reckless
big-spenders at the table, but mindless short-sighters who refuse to raise
taxes under any circumstances. So, in Sacramento, minority Republicans will
not allow the people to vote on basic tax extensions which could prevent
more parks from closing.

The above is reason to hate contemporary politicians, who show all the
creativity of Soviet-era dress designers. In the meantime, our heritage � in
the natural world and in preservation of the stories and people who came
before us � is being erased.

Jack London�s credo, as he told a reporter two weeks before his death of a
kidney-related failure in 1916, is worth repeating here, as a courage nudge.

�I would rather my spark should burn out in a brilliant blaze than it should
be stifled by dry-rot,� said London, who looked like a young Warren Beatty.
�The function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days
trying to prolong them. I shall use my time!�

He wrote adventure stories, social tracts and one of the best short stories
ever, �To Build a Fire.� In his brief life, the illegitimate boy who was
raised by an ex-slave became an oyster pirate, a South Pacific sailor, a
dock worker, a prospector of gold mine stories in the Yukon and, in his
happiest mode, a country farmer in the Valley of the Moon.

�I write for no other purpose than to add to the beauty that now belongs to
me,� he said once he�d moved to the Valhalla above Glen Ellen. On the ranch,
�I have everything to make me glad I am alive.�

Dry-rot is what awaits London�s home, with its glassed sleeping porch where
he took his last breath, with its views of the terraced hillside where he
learned to till the ground in a place of limited water. A few miles below is
a big old wooden water wheel, at a tourist spot called Jack London Village.
It churns away, without explanation.

A few years from now, people will stumble upon the overgrown remains of
London�s home and wonder, as I did looking at the water wheel: what was that
all about